Waiting
by OXBastetXO
Summary: Hammond knew what was going to happen. He knew he couldn’t stop it or change it. He just has to wait. Tag for 1969. Dedicated in memory to Don S. Davis.


Title: Waiting

Author: OXBastetXO

Rating: PG

Archive: Please ask first

Status: complete

Category: Episode Tag

Summary: Hammond knew what was going to happen. He knew he couldn't stop it or change it. He just has to wait.

Spoilers: 1969

Sequel/Season: Most of the way through Season Two and the Movie

Authors Note: I don't own Stargate or MGM, Top Secret Productions, Gekko, or Scifi or anything else. I'm just borrowing them, though I may keep Daniel and others a bit longer. ;-)

This fic originally was published in Ad Astra Per Aspera in 2000. I lost my computer copy of it and had to retype the whole thing. headdesk

* * *

I would like to dedicate to the man who inspired the story by his performance as General George Hammond, Don S. Davis. He will sorely be missed.

Don S. Davis

1942 – 2008

* * *

Waiting

By

OXBastetXO

General George Hammond stood looking out the briefing room's large observation windows facing the Stargate below, but his focus wasn't on the graceful arch of the alien artifact. Instead, he saw what had taken place some thirty years before in this very place. The day that changed his life, and his career. The day a young lieutenant George Hammond met four strangers from very far away.

That day had started out as any other. Normal duty roster filled with the normal amount of normal duties. The only thing that was out of the ordinary was a test fire of one of NORAD's Triton missiles. They had checked and rechecked the pre-fire protocols. The board was green. The general had given the order to start countdown. All had proceeded smoothly until suddenly, the rockets had refused to fire and then had come the intruder alert.

The news had spread quickly through the small facility. Commies had broken in and sabotaged the test fire. Nobody knew how they had done it, or even how they had gotten in. All they knew was there were four of them, three men and a woman. Speculations had been running wild. Only one of the Commies had even looked like soldier, some older man with graying hair and a smart mouth. The most popular of the rumors was that they must have been commies who had been working deep undercover. The young guy with the long hair was obviously some kind of spy.

Everybody knew those hippies were sympathetic to the commies. The guy had to be a spy, but not a real bright one. He had given himself away when the major had asked him if he was a spy and he had answered in Russian. There was that big mountain of a black man with a weird tattoo on his forehead, had to be one of those black power things. Then the oddest member of the group, a woman, and a looker at that. A woman on a commando unit was unheard of, but then, these were commies, they didn't have the normal sense of decency that the good Old Americans held dear and true.

George had been assigned the duty of going through their things, that was when he had found it. Tucked in the pocket of the woman's vest, a note addressed to him…in his own handwriting.

_"Help them."_

That's all it said. Pour and simple. No why or how, just _"Help them."_

At first, he thought it must have been a trick, then he really thought about it. How would they have known that he was the one who would got through their things? How could they have known his name? Why would they have gone to the trouble of forging his handwriting? There were too many variables. The major could have just as easily have told Kennedy or Brookes to do this. Too much of a coincidence. There was something much bigger going on there than just dumb luck. Something he had to know about.

Then he found out.

At the risk of his career, he had helped them escape. All on the word of a spunky young captain, a cranky colonel, a confused archaeologist, and a somber dark man who turned out to be an alien.

He would have never believed them if it hadn't been for what they had seemed to know about him and the gun which looked like something straight of Buck Rogers.

Over the following years, the chance encounter had dimmed in his memory until it all seemed like it had been some kind of crazy dream. That was until one night nearly five years later, when he and Margaret had taken the girls to see Star Wars. He had nearly spit his popcorn halfway across the theater when Luke had first introduced himself to Obi-Wan. Luke Skywalker! Hammond chuckled to himself. Hardly, more like Han Solo. Margaret asked him what was wrong. He patted her hand and said it was nothing. How could he tell her and expect her to believe him when he hardly believe it himself? Anyway, he hadn't wanted to spoil the evening. He got so few quiet evenings like that with his family and little did he know then there were so few left. He lost Margaret just a few short years later to breast cancer.

It was just after he lost Margaret that he met another Air Force officer by the name of Jacob Cater. Jacob had recently lost his own wife to a car accident. George manage dto keep close to his girls even through all the heartache of Margaret's illness. Jacob hadn't been that lucky. His relationship with his son and daughter had deteriorated badly after the accident. Mark, the oldest, had gone off to college and never looked back, but Jacob did mange to patch things up to an extent with his daughter, Samantha. George could still remember the pride in his friend's voice when he told him she had joined the Air Force, NASA bound, but it hadn't been until the first time he saw the young woman in uniform that things clicked in place. Holy Hannah, as Jacob would have put it. The spunky young captain, just an airman then, but someday…

Then came Catherine Lanford. George had heard through hthe grapevine about a top secret project going on under NORAD. Some join project with a civilian group. Then came the call from General West.

The Stargate, at least that's what one of the archaeologist who had been hired to translate it had dubbed the device. He arrived to get briefed just after what was left of the team that had been sent through, returned. Only three men out of the original nine man team had returned. Five black Ops personnel and one civilian, an archaeologist by the name of Daniel Jackson, had been killed by alien hostiles on another planet.

Another planet. The very fact that they had found another planet let alone gone there and bound people was…unbelievable. But that those people were humans brought to the planet from earth by aliens thousands of years before was…well, it was just too much for this old country boy.

With the advent of the Stargate and his subsequent posting there, things started to fall into place. He remembers his surprise when a posting request came across his desk from a certain Captain Samantha Carter. From what he remembered of the dates on the note, he managed to match them with something to do with solar flares. He decided to put the brilliant young captain to work on the project. That was until they decided to mothball the whole Stargate project and Cater was reassigned to a Think-tank at the Pentagon. Then fate decided to take a distinctly more interesting and different turn.

That was when he had met the second very familiar face in the form of one Colonel Jack O'Neill, retired.

He had read his reports, but they hadn't prepared him for the shock of seeing him. Hair not quiet so grey as he remembered, but the same cocky self-assurance. One by one the players were falling into place.

The whirlwind events that followed the reopening of the Stargate and the return of one slightly less than deceased Doctor Daniel Jackson were almost as unbelievable as the very gate itself.

The first time he had seen Jackson, standing there on the ramp, smelling like a goat and looking like a missing extra from Lawrence of Arabia, he wouldn't have given a plug nickel for the man's worth to the project. But later, he caught a glimpse of him cleaned up and in a spare uniform and hit him. Number three.

Then came the most startling member of all, Teal'c. He almost blurted the whole thing to O'Neill when he laid eyes on the Jaffa and asked, "Colonel, do you know who this is?"

O'Neill just responded, "Yes, sir, the man who saved our lives."

It was hard not to just jump in and fight for Teal'c's inclusion to SG-1, but that was one thing he couldn't do. It had to be their decision. With what had happened to Jackson's wife, it had been a bit of touch and go at the start, but they had meshed into SGC's premier team.

Hammond sighed and looked out at the silent Stargate. They were out there, somewhere…not somewhere...he knew where…and when, but they would have to find their own way home this time. He knew they could do it.

He just had to wait.

fin


End file.
